Homeland

To see America through the lens of Homeland is to understand the country like never before. For years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home.

Richard Beck grippingly explores how life took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbours, and the strangers they sat next to on planes. He describes the NFL games fortified like military bases in enemy territory, the surging sales of guns, SUVs, and pickup trucks, the racism and xenophobia, erosion of free speech, and normalisation of mass surveillance.

A war launched to avenge an attack committed by two dozen people quickly came to span much of the globe. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused or endorsed the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time understanding themselves as patriots. It is a drastic oversimplification to say that the war on terror betrayed US values. In many respects, it embodied them.

This is a fascinating and defining account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America.